Citizenship for Children

During this webinar, we will cover the complex issues involving citizenship for children. We will review acquisition and derivation of citizenship, as well as INA § 322 citizenship for children. We will concentrate on how to use the ILRC’s easy-to-read charts, which spell out eligibility for acquisition and derivation, and we will walk through examples of each kind of citizenship for children. After attending this webinar, practitioners will be significantly more comfortable assisting their clients through the acquisition and derivation processes.

Presenters:

Eric Cohen, ILRC Executive Director

Has been with the ILRC since 1988 and has extensive experience training attorneys, paralegals, community advocates, and organizers on a variety of immigration law, immigrants’ rights, and leadership development topics. Eric is a national expert on naturalization and citizenship law and is the primary author of the ILRC’s manual entitled, Naturalization and U.S. Citizenship: The Essential Legal Guide for Legal Practitioners. Eric has served as a liaison between community groups and CIS (Citizenship and Immigration Services) officials for the San Francisco Bay Area since 1994. Additionally, Eric helped develop ILRC's community model for effectively processing naturalization applications in groups and trained both legal workers and lay advocates in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, and works with community organizers and others on voter education for naturalized citizens. Prior to working at the ILRC, Eric worked with the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, Labor Immigrant Assistance Project where he worked on legalization and union organizing campaigns. He is conversant in Spanish.

Alison Kamhi, ILRC Staff Attorney

Alison is a dedicated immigrant advocate who brings significant experience in immigration law to the ILRC. Prior to the ILRC, Alison worked as a Clinical Teaching Fellow at the Stanford Law School Immigrants' Rights Clinic, where she supervised removal defense cases and immigrants' rights advocacy projects. Before Stanford, she represented abandoned and abused immigrant youth as a Skadden Fellow at Bay Area Legal Aid and at Catholic Charities Community Services in New York. While in law school, Alison worked at the UNHCR, the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project, and Greater Boston Legal Services Immigration Unit. After law school, she clerked for the Honorable Julia Gibbons in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Alison enjoys playing the piano and traveling. Before law school, she received a Fulbright Scholarship to study the rise of neo-Nazism and anti-immigrant sentiment in former East Germany. She has also lived in Russia, France, Cambodia, and Madagascar. Alison received her J.D. from Harvard Law School and her B.A. from Stanford University.